I and some others recently saw an interesting (clever but in a gross way) spam development, exploiting the privacy of favoriting.

It was an account set up as a bot using the Mastodon logo and name to appear official. Its profile was devoted entirely to text claiming your PC was infected and your account would be removed for slowing down Mastodon if you didn’t click a suspicious link to fix it. The account had no posts, follows, or followers.

It seemed to operate by favoriting potential victims’ posts without boosting, leaving no visible tracks of where it had been or what it was doing, while bringing eyes to its profile. I know I clicked over to its profile to see what the heck was up. I wasn’t the only one.

The scammers have arrived.

#bots #spam #scam #scammers #Mastodon #malware